A Passion for Letterpress: Refurbishing a Century-old Machine

The springs, screws, and roller hooks soaking in one of those solvents, something called "PB Blaster":

The chase - which was in very good shape and the inking plate which had dried ink from God-knows-what-century on it:

The body of the press after cleaning it up:

The super-clean inking plate after scraping ink off and and steel-wooling, and the other parts nicely de-rusted and cleaned:

The sorted type (don't even ask how long it took me to sort type with my old blurry eyes and a tweezer after it was delivered in a plastic baggie):

The final task would be to find or make a new roller. Thank heavens for e-bay. Would you believe that someone actually builds these things? I purchased a brand new roller for a Baltimore No. 9 press on e-bay. It had new trucks and rubber that didn't look shriveled up like an old tree.

New roller next to shaft of old roller (after carving off what was left of the old rubber):

And then came the final assembly. The only thing I was afraid of was if everything would actually fit together with the new roller. Much to my surprise, it fit like a dream. Here are two shots of the roller in different positions - on the inking plate and along the chase - perfectly flush:

Stay tuned to see what I manage to print with this thing. The only thing I can guarantee is that any prints will be rather tiny since the platen (the plate that holds the paper) is not much larger than a business card. But I just got my first delivery of letterpress ink, and a friend at the museum is digging up additional artifacts (printing blocks and tools for positioning the printing plate and type in the chase) from his old letterpress printing days.